Story Map Shortlist: Zoom in function for entries.

[MeyerVang]

I am creating a tour guide for a large university and was wondering if there was a function where one can automatically zoom in on a certain entry on the map, when it is clicked on in the side tab entry. Not sure if there is already an editing tool you can use to solve this but I would like to know the best way to do this, if possible.

Thanks

[RupertEssinger · Accepted solution]

Hi Meyer. This isn't supported in the Story Map Shortlist app.

By default, when you zoom in on a map in a Shortlist, the places shown in the tab are updated to just show the ones within that extent, so auto-zooming to a specific place would keep restricting/limiting the number of places in the tabs.

You can choose the option in the Shortlist Settings dialog for the tabs to always show all places, In that case, if the user clicks on a place that is not currently displayed on the map, the Shortlist will pan the map to center it at that point. So if your Shortlist tabs show all the places, then if your users open the Shortlist, click a place and then manually zoom in on the map to see it in at the scale they want, and then they choose a different place that isn't in the current map extent, the map will pan keeping the scale they chose,

[MelissaPrindiville]

Hi Rupert,

I understand that this is not a function of the shortlist story map.  Is there any work around to include this type of requirement (zoom to tab extent) of does the shortlist not capable?

-Melissa

[RupertEssinger]

Hi Melissa

That functionality could be added in by customizing the Story Map Shortlist via coding. This would require that a developer download and self-host the code. For example a link could be added into the panel that gives you details about the selected place that zooms in on it when clicked. You'd ideally use the option to show all places in the tabs (instead of having the tab content be extent sensitive) so that zooming in closely on the map doesn't empty the tabs.

Two other approaches that might be good to consider if you want your users to be able to browse a set of places showing close up cartography of each place. These don't involve doing any app customization via coding:

- You could use Story Map Tour and set the Zoom Level (via the Settings dialog) so that users see each location in your tour in close up.

- You could present your places in a Story Map Journal, with a section in your Journal for each place, with text and images about the place and a corresponding map. In Journal, you can control the exact extent that the map displays for each section, or use different maps for different sections. Here is quite a cool example of this approach:

  Great Britain: More Roads Less Traveled
  http://arcgis-content.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=fbf644cbbba441c7bd9b1a00d03c87... 

This is actually a Story Map Series - Tabbed app: the author has created a Story Map Journal for each category of places of interest they want to feature, and then they embedded each Journal into a different tab in a Story Map Series. So the result is rather similar to Story Map Shortlist because there's a tab for each category of places.

Here's another interesting example of the Story Map Journal used to show individual places, by the BLM:

https://blm-egis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=dbca78d13b9c400aa848d634fc9a541a  

In this one each place is an area (a stretch of a river) rather than a point like it is in Story Map Shortlist or Story Map Tour. For each section in the Journal, the author specified the particular extent on the map that they want their end users to see.

Rupert